The entire story of Twitter / X under Elon Musk

A judge in Brazil has ordered the suspension of X after owner Elon Musk failed to designate a new legal representative for the country, according to reports from Bloomberg and local news outlet Poder360.

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes told the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) to limit access to X within 24 hours and has given Apple and Google five days to remove X from their mobile app stores. The country will also impose daily fines of $50,000 Brazilian real (~$8,900 USD) to people who try to access X through a virtual private network (VPN), as reported by Poder360.

Elon Musk’s “conversation” with former President Donald Trump got off to a rocky start. The interview, which was hosted on X Spaces and scheduled to begin at 8PM ET on Monday night, crashed immediately and didn’t begin until 42 minutes later.

Those who did manage to get into the Space, including several Verge staffers, said it kicked off with lo-fi techno playing from Trump’s account for roughly 30 minutes.

A group of advertisers, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), have “discontinued” activities, Business Insider reports, citing an email sent to members. The group said it had limited money, and was focused on fighting the antitrust lawsuit filed against it by X.

GARM was an initiative formed in 2019 by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA); the idea was to stop advertising on social media platforms that don’t meet certain safety standards. In its lawsuit, X said that GARM “organized an advertiser boycott of Twitter.”

X is suing a group of major advertisers over accusations that they held an “illegal boycott” against the platform formerly known as Twitter. In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, X claims Unilever, Mars, CVS, Ørsted, and dozens of other brands conspired to “collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue” through a World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) industry initiative.

To join the WFA’s initiative, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), companies must agree to withhold advertising from social platforms that aren’t compliant with the organization’s safety standards. X alleges GARM “organized an advertiser boycott of Twitter” to coerce the company into following the initiative’s safety standards. The lawsuit is being filed despite X announcing that it was “excited” to rejoin GARM last month.

Don Lemon is suing Elon Musk and X over the abrupt cancellation of his deal with the social media platform, alleging fraud, negligent misrepresentation, misappropriation of his name and likeness, and breach of express contract, reports Variety. Lemon’s show was canned in March of this year after a contentious interview with Musk — who, according to the complaint, had promised Lemon he’d have free rein over the content on the show.

The complaint — filed on August 1st in the Superior Court of California for San Francisco County — claims that after advertisers fled Twitter in the wake of Musk’s takeover, Musk and other X executives began courting Lemon with the goal of publicizing “a partnership between X and Lemon” that would associate “the X brand with Lemon’s good name, likeness, identity, and reputation” in order to “rehabilitate” the social platform in the eyes of advertisers.

X uses your data to train its Grok AI assistant, but if you’d like to opt out of that, you can do that right from your settings menu. It is accessible on the web right here, or you can find it yourself if you click the three dots menu, then “Settings and privacy,” then “Privacy and safety,” and then “Grok.”

X’s @Safety account wrote in a post on Friday that the setting is available to all users on the web now and “will soon be rolled out on mobile.”

Years after Twitter replaced the pistol emoji with a green and orange water gun, X has decided to change it back to a regular handgun. An X employee announced the change in a post last week.

The company hasn’t explained the change, but it feels on brand for Elon Musk’s social network. Twitter originally switched its emoji to display a water gun in 2018, following others like Google and Facebook. (Apple made the switch in 2016; Microsoft was a brief holdout.)

A “Trump2024” banner labeled “Promoted by Team Trump” sat atop the What’s Happening summary on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, during the fourth and final night of the Republican National Convention on Thursday.

While the #Trump2024 hashtag temporarily showed the American flag, and clicking it caused an animated “hashfetti” effect with flags raining down, it was the icon attached to the number one trending #MAGA topic that caught our eyes.

Elon Musk says he plans to move X and SpaceX’s headquarters from California to Texas. “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas,” Musk wrote in a tweet, referencing California’s SAFETY Act (AB1955).

Signed on Monday by California Governor Gavin Newsom, it prevents schools from imposing rules requiring teachers to disclose changes to a student’s gender identity without their permission and prohibits retaliation against teachers who refuse to out a student, reports the Los Angeles Times.

During an internal all-hands meeting led by X CEO Linda Yaccarino on Wednesday, concerned employees tuned in to hear if she would address the pressing issue on their minds: performance reviews.

Sources inside the company confirm that a promotions process was recently delayed without explanation and that X’s sales team doesn’t expect to meet its revenue targets for the quarter. Given how the company formerly called Twitter has continued to struggle under Elon Musk’s ownership, employees have been bracing for more layoffs.

X is rolling out private likes as soon as today, according to a source at the company. That means what users like on the platform will be hidden by default, which is already an option for X’s Premium subscribers. Following the publication of this story, X owner Elon Musk reshared a screenshot of it, saying it’s “important to allow people to like posts without getting attacked for doing so!”

A few weeks ago, X’s director of engineering, Haofei Wang, said the upcoming change is meant to protect users’ public image — because “many people feel discouraged” to like “edgy” content. The Likes tab on user profiles will be gone. Users will still be able to see who liked their posts and the like count for all posts, but they will not see the people who liked someone else’s post, according to X senior software engineer Enrique Barragan. (He also hinted at the launch today in a post.)

As spotted by TechCrunch, X updated its guidelines to let users “share consensually produced and distributed adult nudity or sexual behavior” as long as it’s labeled and not in a prominent location, such as a profile picture or banner.

After this article was published, the @Safety account tweeted saying, “We have launched Adult Content and Violent Content policies to bring more clarity of our Rules and transparency into enforcement of these areas. These policies replace our former Sensitive Media and Violent Speech policies - but what we enforce against hasn’t changed.”

Elon Musk has agreed to testify in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s investigation into his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. A legal document filed on Thursday shows that Musk waived his right to appeal a court order that requires him to testify.

This means Musk will have to appear at one of the SEC’s offices for an up to five-hour interview. The document says Musk and the SEC have already agreed to a date, but it’s not disclosed “for confidentiality purposes.”